Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Nel capitolo precedente ho parlato di come la matematica, per mezzo della teoria dei giochi, affronta l’idea filosofica di razionalità. Tale teoria non è però nata né con lo scopo di aiutare la filosofia a chiarirsi le idee, e nemmeno con quello di spiegare come giocare in maniera efficiente. Le sue applicazioni sono davvero notevoli, ne accenno brevemente il motivo.

This paper proposes an abstract model of commodity differentiation that incorporates manufacturing imprecision and dimensioning and tolerancing standards. The potential consistency of such a model based on engineering consideration is analyzed. For a large pure exchange economy, competitive equilibria exist and are Pareto optimal. Production issues such as the derived demand for intermediate products, continuity of cost functions, and product selection and technology issues such as mass customization, agile manufacturing, and manufacturability are discussed.

We develop a method of assigning unique prices to derivative securities, including options, in the continuous-time finance model developed in Raimondo []. In contrast with the martingale method of valuing options, which cannot distinguish among infinitely many possible option pricing processes for a given underlying securities price process when markets are dynamically incomplete, our option prices are uniquely determined in equilibrium in closed form as a function of the underlying economic data.

Adaptive contracting occurs when a principal experiments with the delegation of authority through leaving contracts incomplete. We highlight two potential benefits of adaptive contracting: First, the delegation of authority can be advantageous even if the agent acts opportunistically, since expected private benefits will be shared between the parties through price negotiation. Second, the principal extracts information from experimenting with delegation of authority and we identify a positive option value embodied in the principal’s ability to extend or withdraw the delegated authority in future contracting periods.

Money provides liquidity services through a cash-in-advance constraint. The exchange of commodities and assets extends over an infinite horizon under uncertainty and a sequentially complete asset market. Monetary policy sets the path of rates of interest and accommodates the demand for balances through open market operations or loans. A public authority, which, most pertinently, inherits a strictly positive public debt, raises revenue from taxes and seignorage, and it distributes possible budget surpluses to individuals through transfers. Competitive equilibria exist, under mild solvency conditions. But, for a fixed path of rates of interest, there is a non-trivial multiplicity of equilibrium paths of prices of commodities. Determinacy requires that, subject to no-arbitrage and in addition to rates of interest, the prices of state-contingent revenues be somehow determined.

Are poor people more or less likely to take money risks than wealthy folks? We find that risk attraction is more prevalent among the wealthy when the amounts of money at risk are small (not surprising, since ten dollars is a smaller amount for a wealthy person than for a poor one), but, interestingly, for the larger amounts of money at risk the fraction of the nonwealthy displaying risk attraction actually exceeds that of the wealthy. We also replicate our previous finding that many people display risk attraction for small money amounts, but risk aversion for large ones.

We consider economies with incomplete markets, one good per state, two periods, =0, 1, private ownership of initial endowments, a single firm, and no assets other than shares in this firm. In Dierker, Dierker, Grodal (2002), we give an example of such an economy in which all market equilibria are constrained inefficient. In this paper, we weaken the concept of constrained efficiency by taking away the planner’s right to determine consumers’ investments. An allocation is called minimally constrained efficient if a planner, who can only determine the production plan and the distribution of consumption at =0, cannot find a Pareto improvement. We present an example with arbitrarily small income effects in which no market equilibrium is minimally constrained efficient.

Most of the literature argues that competitive analysis has nothing interesting to say about location. This paper argues, to the contrary, that a competitive model have something interesting to say about location, provided that locations are identical and transportation costs are zero. To do this, it constructs a competitive intertemporal general equilibrium model and applies it to a suggestive example of migration.

This paper provides an extension of general equilibrium theory that incorporates the actions of individuals both as demanders and suppliers of goods and as members of firms, schools, social groups, and contractual relationships. The central notion of the paper is a : a collection of individuals associated with one another for some purpose. The model takes as primitive an exogenous set of group types, interpretable as (potential) firms, schools, social groups, contracts etc. The types of schools and firms that materialize in equilibrium, as well as the way that agents acquire skills, are determined endogenously in a competitive market, as are the contracts they enter into, and the production and consumption of private commodities. Equilibrium exists and the core coincides with the set of equilibrium states. Examples and Applications illustrate the flexibility and power of the framework.

Collective consumption decisions taken by the members of a household may prove inefficient. The impact on market performance depends on whether household inefficiencies are caused by inefficient net trades with the market or by inefficient distribution of resources within households. Inefficient net trades might be consistent with global efficiency. Inefficient internal distribution always results in inefficient equilibrium allocations. This leads us to consider competitive forces as disciplinary device for households. Competition of households for both resources and members can eliminate or reduce inefficient internal distribution.